Outlook On The Desktop is an extremely useful application which brings the most important Outlook 2010 items including Calendar, Inbox, Tasks, Notes, and Contacts, right on the desktop. Since opening Outlook 2010 application each time to view Calendar, Inbox, Contacts, etc., is nuisance-driving, this innovative application eliminates the need of navigating through Outlook to access these items and offers a simple desktop solution. Previously we have reviewed a tool called DeskTask which only brings calendar and tasks on the desktop, Outlook on The Desktop puts the whole email client on the Windows Desktop.

The application offers transparency, comes with highly-customizable interface, and behavior specific options. You can change height and width of the active window and move it to any position on the desktop.

It sits in system tray, letting you show/hide any available Outlook item quickly. Each item has its own viewing options which can be selected from Outlook Views option.

Lets take a look at the Outlook items it brings on the desktop.

RECOMMENDED FOR YOU

Calendar

It imitates the default view (selected in Outlook) on the desktop. As mentioned above, you can always change views to fit your needs. You can list down the events, view them in full month (view) mode, or display only active events/appointments.

Inbox

For Inbox, you can let it know which folder to display. From its system tray menu, click Select Folder to choose one and select Inbox to view the selected folder’s mail items.

Contacts

There’re four views available for Contacts, you can view them in Phone, Business Card, List and Card format. As the application is fully interactive with Outlook, you can use all the right-click options as well.

Similarly, you can bring up any available item on desktop while on the go. From the Preferences, you change opacity, size and position of current Outlook item’s window.

In our experience, it worked perfectly without any noticeable lags. The 32-bit version supports Outlook 2000-2010, 64-bit is only for Outlook 2010. It runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. Testing was done with Outlook 2010 running on Windows 7 x86 system.